Mapquest For Crime
from the putting-the-data-online dept
San Francisco is apparently catching up and leaping over other cities with their new mapping software that tracks the location of various crimes. They're also planning to put the system online so that everyone can use it to see what criminal activity is happening in their neighborhood. They're still debating how much information to show, but since much of it is public information already they'll probably reveal quite a bit. The system will let users "slice and dice" the data so they can view very specific areas and focus on certain types of crime. The article mentions that such information can be quite useful in solving certain crimes, but that many police officers don't use it - since they're so busy with other things. It will be interesting to see if having such information public leads to more cases of private citizens solving certain crimes (or at least coming up with the leads police need).